


Shadowbox

by Clementive



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Canon, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Universe, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Ficlet, Funeral, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Minor Character Death, Nara Shikamaru-centric, Rare Pairings, Sad, Snippets, minor NejiTen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:28:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23290036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clementive/pseuds/Clementive
Summary: After each funeral, they tried to convince themselves there was no hidden meaning in the sky.
Relationships: Nara Shikamaru/Tenten
Comments: 7
Kudos: 19





	1. The Third Hokage

**Author's Note:**

> It has been a terrible day, so here's a angsty snippet collection. 
> 
> Besides, it has been a while since I last wrote ShikaTen... IT WAS TIME I INDULGED!

After the funeral, Shikamaru followed her because she didn't cry.

(He also didn't cry, he recalls. Ino cried softly, then noisily, and Chouji hugged her, also crying. Comforting and crying. A team. They sensed it somehow, how he was more shadow than man, but they still turned their heads toward him, expecting, wanting him to join in. Extending a hand, a shoulder, so he could cry. Let go.

He left.)

The sky fell, in small droplets, then in heavy smashing drops. The clouds lurked heavy, monstrous grey, barely moving. It let it sank into him, ice, extinguished wind.

She didn't slow, wide open, palms toward the sky.

He didn't stop, hunched back, hands in his pockets.

Her buns bounced, wet, and strands slipped out of her hair ties. She skipped, kicking at rocks, jumping in puddles. Mud dripped down her naked legs. It stained her black robes.

She slowed when she reached the training grounds of her team.

Instinctively, Shikamaru also stopped, and he looked up. His shoulders shot up, shaking from the cold. He wiped at his wet face, returning his gaze to the ground.

She took out a scroll from her robes.

Shikamaru watched her for a moment, holding his breath, drinking in gulps of rain. He wondered if he should tell her something.

(There was nothing to say.)

She summoned weapons across the grounds. In numerous successive poufs of smoke, they scattered, digging in the softened ground or merely lying on top of it.

She jumped toward the sky, fast.

He sat on the ground, nonchalant.

She blurred. She threw kunai toward the sky, never missing a mark. She threw herself up and down, faster. He sank in the ground, panting and shivering from the cold.

The sky split opened, grumbling, cracking, turned violet by thunder.

("Were we angry?" Shikamaru asks her, years later, in a hushed whisper. Soothing rain drips down the window, but he hears the clunk of her weapons in the sound. He hears the splash of pounding feet after she lands. "Were we angry kids?" he repeats and flattens his hand across the shadows on the bed sheets.

Her place is still warm.

Tenten grunts and rolls further away in the bed, awake now.

"Isn't it what we always do, though? I throw weapons. You look up at the sky."

She smirks in the darkness, out of reach. Always out of reach. Sky-bound.

"I just wonder if we should have reacted differently," Shikamaru mumbles and closes his eyes.

And he wonders if it would still work, the two of them, if they had cried then. If they had felt loss. If they had been normal children, part of their team, confused and scared.

Not attracted to the sky. How it fell. How it was unattainable.

"You think too much with that big brain of yours," Tenten grumbles in reply.)

"Who are you again?" she asked and bent over him, her hands on her hips.

Shikamaru startled. He hadn't noticed her approach him.

She dripped on him, part of the sky. She expanded, grey eyes, full mouth, her skin slippery and raised by goosebumps.

"Shikamaru," he said through his chattering teeth.

She nodded to herself, solemnly, and there was a flash of metal ripping through rain and sky. Shikamaru didn't move his head. He felt the burn of the kunai ripping through the water.

There was a challenge in her eyes.

She clicked, steel and iron. She carefully weighed another kunai in her hand.

He still didn't move.

"Tenten," she introduced herself with a frown of concentration.

(The sky, heaven. He already knew.)

Tenten aimed and threw another kunai past his head.


	2. Asuma

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And the lockdown continues, so here we are... Enjoy!

It could have been a terrible day for a funeral, Shikamaru thought, if there had been no clouds.

If nothing drifted to disappear above him, suffocated in the smoke of his cigarettes.

It could have been a great day, if she hadn't found him.

If she wasn't so terribly _her_. Heaven.

("We buried the father together. We _had_ to bury the son together.")

Next to him, Tenten sprawled across the grass like a dismantled puppet, a skeleton, shaking and rearranging her limbs together. She fidgeted to mould her shoulders to the grass. She sighed contentedly, stilled, then scratched her forehead. She searched the sky, impatiently.

His jaw tightened.

Shikamaru tried to look at the clouds passively. He tried to ignore her, the hum of her skin, the brush of her clothes whenever she moved. He tried to follow the shift of the wind through each cloud.

(During the war, he tried to bury her in the sky she was named after. In the sky, they had shared since their youth.

"It would have been easier," he explains and kisses her forehead.

"You're just a lazy bastard," she sighs, her lips against his pulse.)

' _Go away_ ,' he pleaded inwardly.

Shikamaru focused on the clouds, his hands trembling and picking at strands of grass under his head. He hoped she would leave, as she often did, reckless and whining, whenever she got bored.

"What does the sky say today?" Tenten said in a sing-song voice.

She squinted. Her neck corded, she arched her back, her face headed toward the sky, the rest of her lifeless on the grass.

"There's no shape," Tenten whined and her hand reached for his side.

She poked and shook him.

Shikamaru didn't react.

He didn't answer.

' _Go away!_ '

Her hand dropped to the grass.

"I thought they would be some awesome shapes like when we were kids. We could find meaning everywhere then," Tenten paused and sighed, holding up her hands to her eyes to form binoculars. She bent her knees and beat at the ground with her feet. "Maybe we just aren't as creative when we aren't old."

' _Go away!_ '

With a sigh, her hands fell back on her stomach.

"Just what is there to see up there, hmm?"

He wanted to scowl.

He wanted to fight her.

(He wanted to kill Hidan again. And again. Why was she one more ghost at his side? Why was she named after the sky?)

"There's really nothing up there," Tenten drawled out each syllable, mimicking his voice.

It was about the smoke that rose, he wanted to shout at her. It was about the dizziness that came with the lack of oxygen, from smoking, the nicotine stain there would soon be on his fingers.

Death.

(It was about reviving Asuma. In his own mundane ways. Smoke. Cigarettes. Laziness. Clouds. A sky that fell before it rose.)

The sky was where the death floated, free, or chained. All the shapes, all the clouds were tombs. He believed in nothing else. Ashes rose. Wind rose. Smoke rose.

Asuma. He was up there, Shikamaru desperately wanted to believe.

"All meaningless," Tenten added flatly. "Boring."

She turned her head toward him and smiled, hollow teeth and hollower heart. Cold.

(Death was meaningless, she meant Shikamaru knew, but he still wanted her to leave. He still didn't allow himself to like the sky. To like her.

"Why did you search for me after the funeral?" Shikamaru asks her over Asuma's tomb when they came back from the war.

"Because I'm troublesome."

She bares her teeth.

He doesn't argue.)

Tenten never left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Kudos and comments, equally appreciated in these rough times <3


	3. Shikaku

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The origin of the word 'checkmate' comes from Farsi and means "the King is helpless". That amused me enough to include it here.

("I was tired... One grave for how many of them?"

She doesn't answer immediately. She keeps walking.

"One fucking grave and no bodies."

Cursing under his breath, Shikamaru hunches his shoulders, cupping his hand to light his cigarette. He grumbles until the light catches.

He exhales, calmer, emptier, staring up.)

One hour after his father's funeral, Tenten caught up with him.

She pinned him to the grass with a flick of her wrist.

("You can't pretend you can escape ghosts, Shikamaru," Tenten answers finally, and she floats across the horizon.

She keeps walking, cut out of shadows and sunlight.)

He fell.

Shocked, guilt and her kunai all pinned him down. The sky widened above him, greyish blue with no clouds in sight.

Time skewed, askew, his heartbeat throbbed in his ears. Shikamaru squinted, blinded by the harshness of the sun, half-sinking in the cracked and parched ground.

' _I'm an ant_ ,' he thought, and he laughed bitterly.

("I told Hidan I was a God when I killed him," he admits and runs his hand up her leg toward the crook of her small back. She tenses. He grazes more than he touches.

"I've never felt this powerful."

He kisses her shoulder and pressed his forehead to her neck, resting there.

She elbows him, shifting underneath him.

"Keep going," she says huskily.)

They were a kilometre away from Konoha. Shikamaru realized it now, staring at the sky, feeling the ground. He had crossed the border of the Fire country without meaning to.

Tenten sat on a branch, her leg dangling in the void. She weighed a second kunai in her hand.

She stared at the bag of clothes and supplies by his side.

She stared at his balled fists.

Their eyes met briefly.

She threw a kunai embed with her chakra to cut short the progression of his shadow jutsu.

He panted through clenched teeth, releasing the jutsu.

Swiftly, two more kunai pinned his hands to his sides.

"Terrible day to run away." Her cool voice floated from above. "Terrible day to avoid a funeral."

Brutally, Tenten carved out the tree drawing the board of a shogi board. The lines are crooked, but she added more and more cases to the board.

"You don't understand." he said stiffly.

He can't fully explain to himself, least of all to her, his grief and his anger.

"I guess it was easy for Asuma. You had someone to blame."

("I know it was troublesome and pitiful... I didn't have anyone to kill."

"I did," Tenten replies and moves her silver general across the shogi board with the tip of her index.

Shikamaru stills.

"You can't tell me, you thought of..."

"I told them..." Tenten replies evenly and scratches her cheek. "I told them, if they ever say he's free from his cage in front of me, I would gut them." She moves another piece to attack his king.

She lifts her blazing gaze to meet his.

"Checkmate."

_The King is helpless._ )

The shogi board was empty.

The sky was empty.

He never thought he would hate it. The word "peace", the world at peace.

He never thought he would hate looking at the sky.

His father died for this, and he hated, _hated_ it.

"What are we supposed to do now?" he asked, exhausted, small and childlike.

An ant.

_The King is helpless._

("What are we supposed to do now?" he whispers, years later.

Her weapon shop is empty.

His job as an advisor to the Hokage is meaningless.

There is still no war.)

Tenten jumped down the tree and landed on her feet. She approached him.

Roughly, she removed a kunai pinning him in place. She held the last one above his head, her gaze piercing through him. Slowly, the tip spun back toward her.

"Tomorrow, we start over," Tenten said flatly, her face unreadable.

She stood up.

He didn't move.

She walked away.

"I'll find you," Shikamaru said before she was out of earshot. "Tomorrow, I'll find you after his funeral."

Tenten stopped, and her face instinctively sought the sky. She sought the birds. She sought peace for herself. For him.

"I wouldn't hold it against you if you didn't," she said quietly, her face eaten by rough shadows. "I loved him too, you know?"

("As long as you loved me too, I didn't care.")

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't help it with the NejiTenShika. I'm a woman of many tropes. huehuehe 
> 
> Next chapter is the last chapter, and we finish with Neji's funeral.
> 
> Thank you for reading! Please take the time to leave a comment if you can. :))
> 
> Stay safe, you guys!


	4. Neji

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy! This is the last chapter :)

"Neji would have hated how formal it was," Tenten said softly the night of his funeral, and Shikamaru rolled away from her, deflated, frustrated.

He shared her with a ghost.

His lips were raw, cracked, from kissing her. Her touch, the rhythm of her body still hummed against his, etched in his skin.

He ran a hand over his face and glanced sideways at her.

Tenten didn't bother to readjust her kimono. She was dressed in the shadows of the trees. Silk and hair spilled around her. His hands shook, gripping at strands of grass. She had crossed her kimono right over left.

Like a corpse.

Like Neji.

"I thought I wouldn't want to look at the sky anymore," she said and squinted briefly, tilting her head farther back.

Shikamaru sat up and shook the loose grass out of his hair and kimono. 'I shouldn't have come,' he thought.

There was no moon, no stars.

"It's always there," Shikamaru grunted, uncharitable, talking mostly to himself.

It was always there, the sky dividing Neji and Shikamaru over her. Light and shadows. Birds and clouds. He simply couldn't help chasing him too, across the shape of her face tilted up. Across stars and the bluest sky that faded.

Neji died, and the sky was extinguished.

"It should be falling," Tenten still sighed.

Her lips barely moved.

Her chest barely heaved.

Shikamaru paused, hand on the ground, eyes on her. She looked peaceful.

His anger twisted and boiled inside him.

'She's not saying goodbye,' he thought and next to anger, there was terror lodged in his heart. 'I should have won.'

("I wanted to win against him," he admits, days later, and avoids her gaze.

Tenten sharpens, gaze and face, half-rising from the bed.

"You said, you didn't care," she says icily.

He avoids her hands.

"Shika..." she snaps.

Her soul is steel. Her body is iron. She would never bend, never admit, which one has won her heart first. Which one she loves most. She is both weapon and amour, sharp edges that don't give in. They cut and cut.

Through his heart, they cut and cut.

His feet meet the floor, and he is up. And he is gone.

Neji still haunts him.

Neji still haunts them.)

The darkness deepened, the shadows of the trees stretching past him, but she remained in open field. With trembling fingers, Shikamaru patted himself down until he found the package of cigarettes.

"Can I have one?"

Shikamaru startled.

As always, he hadn't seen her move or approach him until she was crouching next to him. Tenten smiled, amused, but her smile never reached her eyes.

She reached forward and took the unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.

"Light it," she said her lips pressed against the cigarette.

She shoved his knee.

"Come on!"

He gripped her wrist.

"No."

("It's you, you know? It's only you that's haunted."

She always finds him so easily that he wants to laugh. And cry. And rage. He closes his eyes. She runs her fingers through his hair.

"You need to stop it with that big brain of yours," she mutters, indestructible steel. "Stop it."

Her hand moves to his neck.

"Stop shadowboxing with him. Let him rest."

He huffs, his heart pounding. 'Is this what I've been doing?'

"Troublesome woman.")

"Troublesome woman."

Shikamaru took his cigarette back.

Tenten shrugged and flopped back on the grass.

"Lazy-ass," she puffed out her cheeks.

Her hand sought his. It tugged at it. _Reassure me. Comfort me._ There were times when there were unsuspected cracks to her, deep and small, and she looked human and dishevelled and sad.

Shikamaru lied back next to her, ashes dusting his chest. He flickered his cigarette to the side, then stubbed it out after a moment of hesitation.

One of his arm moved to support his head, the other snaked underneath hers.

He closed his eyes, matching his breathing to hers. And he waited. He waited for her to shift and fidget again.

For her to point up and say, _"Don't tell me you don't see it, Nara! It's the exact same shape!"_ again _._

For her to elbow him again, until he agreed.

He waited for her to live again.

("I guess it's until death do us part, huh?")

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cultural note: The bit about kimono folding is true. Corpses have their kimono folded the right side over the left one for funerals, while (living) people fold theirs, left over right side.
> 
> Thank you to the few people who have followed this story.
> 
> Stay safe, stay home! Much, much love to all of you.

**Author's Note:**

> Just so you know: Update will probably be every two days. :)
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
